Apple has become America's first trillion-dollar company

Saturday, 04 August, 2018

At our closing share price of $207.39, the stock market now values Apple at more than $1 trillion. Those earnings beat Wall Street expectations on the top and bottom lines, but iPhone sales fell slightly short.

Mario Ritter adapted this story from VOA News and wire reports.

CEO Tim Cook celebrated the moment in an all-staff memo by acknowledging it as a "significant milestone" that gives Apple's workers "much to be proud of", while adding that it is "not the most important measure" of Apple's success.

"The brand still stands for quality product, great design, ease of use and a customer-first approach to technology", analyst Milanesi said of Apple.

Amazon has provided stiff competition in the race to past the trillion dollar mark, following strong Amazon Prime Day sales last month and November's Black Friday, pushing founder Jeff Bezos to becomethe world's richest man. But since this calculation is based on outstanding shares in early May and, more importantly, not counting the number of shares Apple has bought back recently, it leads us to the higher $206.49 figure earlier mentioned.

Part of the argument against a company hitting a trillion dollars in market value - and staying there - is finance's so-called law of large numbers. "Apple went from hip to has-been in just 19 years", wrote the publication at the time.

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The first company to hit $1 billion in market capitalization - this was far before the breakup of AT&T into the "Baby Bells", which occurred in 1982.

Synovus Trust portfolio manager Dan Morgan said he owns shares of Amazon mostly because of its dominance of the cloud computing industry, a business that grew 42 percent in the June quarter and provided most of Amazon's operating profits.

Apple has boasted steadily rising revenues for many years, 2016 being the notable exception, and experts are already anticipating big increases in the company's value.

Originally founded as a maker of computers in 1976, Apple expanded to dozens of product categories in the 1990s, many of which were unsuccessful. That company is now worth about $205 billion.

This streamlining is putting millions of dollars in the pockets of small companies, which now have a vital role in producing some the world's most popular products.

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